Sustainable protein--in SPACE!

If meat is an unsustainable protein source, what could replace it?

I ask the question because, unfortunately, meat production from livestock is an extremely resource-intensive exercise. There literally are not enough resources on Planet Earth to feed everyone in the world a protein-rich, Western-style diet. You don't have to be vegan to look at the facts and figure that out.

One of the most pernicious myths about meat, in my opinion, is the idea that confined animal feeding operations (abbreviated CAFOs) are more efficient and less expensive than less intensive farming methods. Say what you will about pollution, antibiotic resistance, and other serious problems, its proponents argue, at the end of the day, CAFOs produce more meat, more efficiently.

Well, only if you leave out several, really important costs, and only look at market price, it appears. Kernels of truth may be embedded in those myths, but they don't stand up well to scrutiny.

It turns out varying degrees of rather large difference could be made if we Westerners made relatively small adjustments to our diets. My April blog posts have mostly been about Spaceship Earth, but questions raised on this terrestrial ball grow more crucial on the Final Frontier.

The designers of the Bernal Sphere in the 1970s envisioned intensive agriculture as the way to feed space colonists. They didn't know then what we know all too well now. Painting by Rick Guidice, NASA Ames Research Center.

I recently gave Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham, AKA James S. A. Corey, a hard time about the diet of fungi and fermentation on their fictional Ceres, but I've done much of the same research they likely did. I think they didn't "sell" their Ceres diet in a very appealing manner, possibly to make an artistic point about the desperate awfulness of life on Ceres.

Truth is, many innovative ways are being developed to use both fungi and fermentation in food production. This includes the creation of milk that is molecularly identical to cow-sourced milk, and logically leads to many other dairy products, made from yeast and sugars.

Cow-free dairy products--brought to you by fungi and fermentation--with some help from Perfect Day Foods.

When you put it that way, life on Ceres might be grim and desperate, but there'd be ice cream! (Well, there SHOULD be). Lactose-free, to boot! Such a deal! This doesn't answer where the sugars come from, although there's a variety of options. But the innovations don't stop with dairy products.



Hampton Creek Foods went through quite a bit of turmoil after the video above was made. They've come out on the other side of controversy and scandal as JUST, a smaller company--but their products are still available, and apparently commercially viable. Their egg-less solutions depend on using plant-sourced substitutes: pea protein, for their Just Mayo, sorghum for Just Cookies and Just Dough, and mung beans for Just Scramble.

But many of the best protein sources are meat/animal muscle-based, although "the best" depends on how you define "best." Just is tackling the problem of "clean" meat, too--and so are others.

The first lab-grown meat was unveiled in 2013 by Mark Post of Maastricht University. It was made using beef stem cells, as well as vegetable-sourced ingredients.

The livestock industry, not surprisingly, has mounted a defense against calling any meatlike cultured protein "meat," much less "clean meat" (the horror! Although apparently "pink slime" is perfectly acceptable to call "meat"?)

JUST is going for a completely non-animal-sourced clean meat, but most of the pioneering attempts in that field begin with animal stem cells. However they make it, the process won't require the same levels of resource-use, and it won't involve slaughtering animals. That strikes me as a win-win, even while planetbound.

Although early attempts at clean meat have turned out to be relatively dry and extremely expensive, this industry is still in its infancy--and already the taste is improving. By the time Balchu tries to take Shady's mind off her troubles by tossing bacon strips to her, the "carneries" of Rana Station will have perfected a delicious little piece of pork-flavored heaven with nary an oink nor a squeal in its origin.

"Outredgeous" Romaine lettuce in the Veggie Plant Growth Facility: will this someday be an "heirloom varietal" for space-farers? 

Whatever we end up doing in space and in artificial, space-or non-terrestrial-based habitats, we'll have to eat. Plants are likely to be the foundation of all space-grown food. They've been doing plant-growing experiments on the International Space Station for years. In 2015, this resulted in the successful cultivation-to-edibility of a type of red Romaine lettuce called "Outredgeous," which expedition crew members were officially cleared to eat. It was grown in the Veggie Plant Growth Facility onboard.

To quote Astronaut Scott Kelly, it was "One small bite for man, one giant leap for #NASAVEGGIE." What next? Perhaps to infinity, and beyond!

IMAGES: Many thanks to The World Resources Institute, for the chart of compared resources required to produce types of food; to FranceInfo, for the photo of the US feedlot; to Medium, artist Rick Guidice, and NASA Ames Research Center for the Bernal Sphere image; to Perfect Day Foods, for the "Favorite Things" dairy lineup illustration; to Bloomberg and YouTube, for the video about the chicken-less egg substitutes; to Borgen Magazine for the photo of the pioneering meat patty; and to NASA and Space.com, via my Space Station Designs Pinterest Board, for the photo of the space-grown lettuce.

Space Station DIY: Should we go Tubular?

NASA artist Don Davis gave us a vision of how
it might look inside an O'Neill cylinder with
reflected sunlight.

My quest to find a plausible, space-based home for the characters in my novels continued.

I needed a space-based habitat that would feel earthlike-enough for me (and my readers) to believe that humans could be comfortable there long-term. But it also must be believable, based on what we know or can reasonably extrapolate from physics, space, engineering, and technology.

So far in this DIY Space Station series we've considered space stations/colonies in general, Dyson structures, and Bernal spheres. The next design I considered was the O'Neill Cylinder, a design developed by one of the founders of this area of engineering and design, Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, of Princeton University. 

The idea for this design evolved out of O'Neill's work for NASA and at Princeton. His Island One and Island Two designs were Bernal spheres, but the larger Island Three design proposed a paired-cylinders design that sought to solve several problems with the Bernal sphere design.

His 1976 book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space described the "Islands," and developed the concept of the paired cylinders. Why paired cylinders? So they can  cancel out a gyroscopic effect that would make it difficult to keep them aimed at the sun. Each cylinder was to be four or five miles in diameter and up to 20 miles long, with six sections: three "window" areas, interspersed with three "land" areas. Each cylinder could provide habitat for several million people.

There would be a separate section for agriculture, designed much like the so-called "Crystal Palace" of the Bernal sphere design. As I pointed out in my Bernal sphere post, today we know far more about the pitfalls of industrial-style agriculture than we did in the 1970s. I'll go into more detail about space-based agricultural issues in a future post.

O'Neill cylinders utilize a shape identified by the creators of Kalpana One as the most efficient for a space habitat (more about Kalpana One in a different future post), but I ultimately found it difficult to imagine living in one, for many of the same reasons as the Bernal sphere.

Also, I didn't like the slight Coriolis effect that would occur if the habitat was built the size O'Neill originally proposed. There were economic reasons for that size: O'Neill was trying to get the US Government to consider funding one of his "Islands." Their size was dictated by 1970s-based calculations. Unfortunately, the head of the Senate subcommittee that handled NASA's funding considered a large-scale space habitat a "nutty fantasy," and the project was killed.

Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) thought Gerard K. O'Neill's space-settlement ideas were a "nutty fantasy." Proxmire was famous for identifying government programs he thought were silly, and awarding them the Golden Fleece Award. Fear of his wrath led NASA to kill O'Neill's project.

Of course, there's no reason to think a larger version couldn't be built, if the economics of the builders supported it. Rama, the space habitat described by Arthur C. Clarke in his 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama, is about 50% larger than the classic O'Neill cylinder, but as I understand it, it's based in part on O'Neill's design. I found a video that offers a 3D-animated "tour" of Rama. I enjoyed it, and I hope you do too.



Side note: yes, my own Rana Station's name was chosen with a nod to Rama, although I ultimately chose a different design configuration for my space habitat. The name "Rana" (with an n) means "attractive, eye-catching, elegant," which is what cinched the choice for me. I'm an artist: it had to appeal to my eyes, too!

Besides Clarke's Rama, other famous O'Neill cylinders in science fiction include the space station Babylon 5 and the space habitats (sides) in the Gundam Universe.

Babylon 5--but where are the windows? And are those solar panels, or heat exchangers?

Animators of the Mobile Gundam series paid close attention to the design of O'Neill cylinders. This is an interior view of Loum (Side 5).

IMAGES: Many thanks to Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons and Don Davis for the upper image of the cylinder interior; for the High Frontier first edition cover featuring art by Rick Guidice; for the 1970s rendering of an exterior view of paired cylinders, also by Guidice; and for the photo portraits of Senator William Proxmire and Gerard K. O'Neill. 
I am indebted to the Maveric Universe Wiki for the GoetzSheuermann image of Island One. 
Many thanks to YouTube and Eric Bruneton for the Rama animation, to Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange for the image of the Babylon 5 Space Station, and to The Universal Century, for the interior image of Loum (Side Five) a space colony from the Mobile Gundam universe.

Space Station DIY: Bernal Spheres?

I needed a plausible space station for my fictional characters to live in. My research yielded such riches, I decided to share them with you in a series of “Space Station DIY” blog posts.

  

John Desmond Bernal

Today, let’s consider the Bernal Sphere. It’s an idea originally cooked up by John Desmond Bernal in 1929. Bernal was primarily known as a pioneer in molecular biology, but his concept of a spherical habitat in space seemed plausible enough for NASA to launch a more in-depth study in 1975-76.

Gerard K. O'Neill

That study led to Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill’s proposal for Island One, a relatively small Bernal Sphere. This was followed by the larger Island Two (which, it was hoped, would provide a more practical industrial base). By the time O’Neill got to Island Three, he’d evolved to a different shape, the O’Neill Cylinder (we’ll discuss that design in a future post). Other research rooted in the Bernal Sphere eventually led to a toroidal design, often called a Stanford Torus. 

The wine-tasting party doesn't seem to mind if the world is inside-out.

What would it be like, to live in a Bernal Sphere? Artwork from the mid-1970s gives us a glimpse of an inside-out world, in which you could see the other side of the colony “up in the sky.” I don’t know about you, but I think that would give me terrible vertigo.

Recreation at the poles: nets and micro-gravity sex?

The artificially-generated centrifugal gravity would fall to nothing at the poles, which some have thought would make those good recreational areas. The illustration above envisions “Zero gravity honeymoon suites,” but doesn’t seem to consider the problems of space-sickness caused by microgravity, or the realities of Newton’s Third Law. Perhaps people would be better advised to enjoy their marital bliss in the 1-G areas, and play Quidditch at the poles. 

Perhaps people could play Quidditch at the poles of the Bernal Sphere.

The outside view shows a series of rings on one end, stacked next to the sphere. This would be the so-called “Crystal Palace” for agriculture to feed the population of 10,000 (on Island One). 

External view of Island One, with agricultural "Crystal Palace" tori at one end.

Unfortunately, scientists and engineers in the 1970s were not much concerned about the issues involved in intensive farming, so they followed contemporary ideas, and designed their Crystal Palace to be a cow-, pig-, and chicken-hell. I wonder how much concern they had about overuse of antibiotics and methane production (perhaps they could use the latter as a fuel, but what about the smell?), as well as the relative economies of growing plant crops versus livestock. Maybe they just couldn't imagine life without steak?

Livestock Hell in space? Maybe not such a good idea after all.

Ultimately, I decided the Bernal Sphere was not the design for my fictional space station. If I didn’t want to imagine living there, why would I try to make my characters do so? Might recall O'Neill apparently moved away from the original sphere-focused idea, too, once he looked into it more. But although my fictional Rana Habitat Space Station didn't turn out to be a Bernal Sphere, the design gave me some interesting ideas. I hope you've enjoyed this exploration. 

Earlier posts in this series have discussed space stations in popular culture and conjecture, and the idea of Dyson spheres. 

IMAGES: Many thanks to the ever-invaluable Wikipedia, for the photos of John Desmond Bernal and Gerard K. O'Neill; to the NASA Ames Research Center for the 1970s-era artwork of the Bernal Sphere interior, exterior, and "Crystal Palace" cutaway detail; to the National Space Society, for the artist's rendering of the Bernal Sphere recreational area; and to Entertainment Weekly for the Harry Potter Quidditch image. I appreciate all of you!